The cooling system has a key role in the design process of diesel engines: it allows the survival and the durability of the hottest components; also, performances and emissions are related to its efficiency.

Main aim of the system is to prevent cracks and thermal fatigue stress in base engine components: head and block first of all; for these components, a fluid core (cooling jacket) surrounds the hot surfaces related to the combustion and has to be designed as a main component of the system.

Tuning the coolant passages by modifying their dimension in the head gasket is a practice commonly used in order to enhance the efficiency of the jacket and the entire system: thus, it is possible to act on the coolant flow, for example increasing locally the flow velocity to ensure the best cooling in hottest regions, avoiding boiling risk. In addition, a trade-off between performance, durability and emission has to be found: this process could become long and heavily constrained.

A parametric automatic topology optimization tool would allow to analyze quickly and efficiently small geometry modifications: gasket holes scaling could be treated as a set of parameters to optimize the cooling jacket performance. In this work, various optimization algorithms, performing automatic gasket tuning, were benchmarked and assessed based on quality of results, computational efficiency, user-friendliness.